Mauled by a PANDA

So I almost got mauled by a PANDA today.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, on mturk, a PANDA is link that will automatically accept a HIT. It's short for "Preview AND Accept," which is the kind of link you get if you click the "automatically accept next HIT" checkbox from an active HIT. (I'm butchering this explanation, but it's common enough that if you google it, you'll find tons of detailed posts about how to use PANDA links.)

So anyway, you can accept up to 25 HITs (until they expire), so it's kinda a common thing to use a PANDA link for popular batches. Basically, you're just grabbing as many of them as you can before they all disappear. If you worked them one by one (waiting until you completed one to accept another), you might not be able to get as many.

But since I've been more of a casual turker, I didn't really try anything with PANDA links until recently. And in the last few days, I've bee playing with opening a PANDA link in a separate tab or window, then auto-refreshing that tab while I work from my "Hits Assigned To You" queue.

And that's what I was doing his morning when I started turking at my house. Then my Internet connection went down. I knew I had a few HITs that would expire if I didn't get to them within an hour or so, so I decided to head to my office to work there for a while. Cleaned up the few HITs I had accepted from home, opened a new PANDA window, and kept working away. A few hours later, I closed my PANDA window so I could finish up what I had accepted and then go to lunch.

But the HITs kept coming.

It didn't make sense... until I realized that my home Internet must have come back up... and I never closed the PANDA tab there... Oops! Felt like the classic I Love Lucy scene in the chocolate factory!

Much overdue update

So it's been a while :)

I asked a question in my last post: could I take a break from turking to enjoy something else (a vacation, etc) and still want to come back to it?

Apparently, the answer is yes. Over the summer I stepped away from turking for a few days to a week on several occasions, and I still came back. And I'm doing very well.

Here's my latest: it's been almost 6 months now since I created my mturk account. As of this writing, I have submitted 14,003 HITs, 13,997 approved, 6 rejected. I am still working primarily for Crowdsurf, and that's been an interesting ride as they have started making some moves to leave mturk (or at least offer an alternative that will pay a better rate than mturk in order to encourage us to leave).

Mturk more than doubled the rates it charges requesters over the summer. Several large requesters have already left, and the increase will likely curtail or cut off participation from some smaller academic requesters whose surveys have been previously been an mturk staple. I'm not sure how much of this is seasonal and how much of it is a reaction to the price hike, but it seems like at any given time, there are fewer HITs available overall, and those that are available are mostly very low paying HITs.

But on the plus side, mturk doesn't have any sort of noncompete or user agreement that says you can't work for a requester outside of mturk, so I'm guessing requesters will continue to post penny jobs to mturk and take their more experienced workers elsewhere for higher paying jobs.

And speaking of higher pay... at the time of my last post, one month in, I was thrilled to make over $100 in a week. Now... I usually have one day each week where my total is over $100. So yeah... I still think it's worthwhile to continue to turk :)